While listening to the lessons I thought about my experience as a teacher and the challenge to teach to teenagers that are very most exposed to technology. I completely agree that we need to change our mental structures and our way of teaching in order to really engage the students. We need to make them the protagonists, and real inquirers and thinkers. I really think that the idea of a bunch of different subjects separated one from the other ones, is not an option anymore in an education model for today. I also think that we don’t need a super wise professor that doesn’t connect with his or her students. I am more for the option of teachers and students working as a team, and teachers that are capable of challenging their students by giving them concrete and real projects to work with. I think that more and more we really need to keep thinking outside the box.

During these lessons we studied some elements that I really think are pillars for a good education with real results:

To have a clear idea of the role that we play as teachers; maybe if we think about ourselves as instructors or leaders who bring the group to work together, we will be closer to what it is supposed to be the education nowadays. I also think that the teacher doesn’t have to have all the answers, but to guide the students to the investigation and discover with them. We have to be flexible, give purposeful choices to our students, and to adjust to all the situations. I think we have to avoid trying to give everything really to them and to make them look for options.

I would like to connect this ideas to a personal experience that is also talking about an education policy that the UNAM (National University of Mexico) has been working very hard for the past years with excellent results.

In my school we worked very hard this year as a teachers community to build interdisciplinary projects as a request of the entity who rules the high school in Mexico, the UNAM. They launched a whole project named Conexiones (Connections) with the idea to work together the different disciplines in one same project. The objectives of this policy are:

Build spaces towards the reflection on interdisciplinarity, understood as means of integrating learning, taking into account the relevant points of thus condition or didactic quality, in order to generate work proposals in the schools themselves.
Analyze successful practices of interdisciplinary work through testimonies and evidence, in order to exchange ideas and build, from what has been studied, proposals to be carried out in the school year 2018-2019.
Share processes and progress in the construction of interdisciplinary project proposals, in order to enrich each one of them.
Evaluate successful experiences of interdisciplinary work in different areas of daily life, to generate ideas that complement the proposed academic work carried out from the beginning of the course to date. Clarify its importance, meaning and meanings.

We worked together throughout the school year 2017-2018, and I really think that the UNAM with this interdisciplinary structure is really providing a real option for the education in our country.

We were supposed to work together teachers from different areas to develop these projects. I was working as an English Teacher with the History and religion Teachers. Our project was about the Human Behavior and we were approaching it from the moral rules from Catholicism and Anglicanism to have elements from the perspective of these two Christian traditions, the historical events, and the cultural part of the two countries involved, Mexico and England. It was a very fruitful work, and after going through all the steps, I think we were able to nail a very interesting project for high school students. They will be working on this project next scholar year.

I can proudly see how the UNAM has improved along the years and how is working with a very strong and experienced team to come up with innovative and deeply relevant ideas in the process of education in Mexico.